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Counting by Cars - Number Recognition Car park

Dimples had lots of fun with this one.
He loves cars, a typical boy! When he is asked what he would like to do his reply is usually ride bikes or play cars. When he goes to Nannies and she asks what are they going to do, as always his reply is just play cars. Usually he draws up roads or sets up car parks and makes awesome glug glug sound effects as they get petrol. To make the usual car play a little interesting with a dash of learning I quickly threw together this car park.

You will need: A large piece of paper or cardboard as your canvas, markers, dot stickers numbered.

I drew up the car park and numbered the car spaces. Use as many or as little numbers as your child is comfortable with. I added some different coloured spaces, to coordinate coloured cars with and labelled some dot stickers with corresponding numbers.

Instantly Dimples got to work, with no instructions he understood the aim of the game. Pretending to make engine sounds as the cars drove through the car park to find the correct space. This was a good activity for number recognition, ordering and matching numbers. I went through and practised counting with him.

Dimples is great at pretend play, it was delightful watching him and listening to him chatter away as engines revved, trucks had reversing beep sounds and the cars precisely drove around the car park and then reversed into the right spot. Next he would chant as he grabbed another car. At first it was any old car but then he started looking for the one that came next and we started counting through the ones that had been parked playing "what comes next?"

Just for the fun of it I numbered the spaces 1-15 and then 15-1. I must remember to identify 6 & 9 the right way up and to write clearly and large enough as there were a few numbers he asked what is that! whoops! I did say it was a quick throw together activity didn't I?